A little bit more than half-way through the article, I came across my favorite part and just had to reproduce it here. I nearly bust a gut laughing...
Still, as historian Michael Beschloss pronounced the day after his election, he’s “probably the smartest guy ever to become president.” Naturally, Obama shares this assessment. As he assured us five years ago, “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors.” Well, apart from his signature health-care policy. That’s a mystery to him. “I was not informed directly that the website would not be working,” he told us. The buck stops with something called “the executive branch,” which is apparently nothing to do with him. As evidence that he was entirely out of the loop, he offered this:
Had I been I informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, “Boy, this is going to be great.” You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, “This is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity,” a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.
Ooooo-kay. So, if I follow correctly, the smartest president ever is not smart enough to ensure that his website works; he’s not smart enough to inquire of others as to whether his website works; he’s not smart enough to check that his website works before he goes out and tells people what a great website experience they’re in for. But he is smart enough to know that he’s not stupid enough to go around bragging about how well it works if he’d already been informed that it doesn’t work. So he’s smart enough to know that if he’d known what he didn’t know he’d know enough not to let it be known that he knew nothing. The country’s in the very best of hands.
Where JFK was associated with King Arthur and Camelot, the same was tried with Obama but it seems to me he comes across as more King John Lackland of England, famous for having had the Magna Carta forced on him and such a bad king (lost land to France, was cruel and vindictive in his rule, etc) there was never another named John, as I understand.
I had an argument with a friend of mine recently, and at the end of it, we both realized we were arguing the same, only to differing degrees. I actually do some software work for this friend, so we are both involved to a certain extent in the software business. For years I have designed, developed and managed the development of desktop applications and web applications for businesses (not commercial websites but internal business applications). For about as long my friend has either sold software he had made for him or operated websites and had modifications made to existing products.
He told me that if a Republican had been in office and was trying to get a website going, he'd have presented a product that actually worked. From my side, and having seen that the government rarely gets things right (particularly the first time) when it comes to large programs, I doubted that a Republican would have been completely successful either. Politicians and bureaucrats push for things on unreasonable timetables, which to them it's important to meet and which has no basis in reality from the engineers' standpoint. Paying extra to put more workers on the project only works to a certain extent.
But we both agreed that anyone with half an ounce of sense (and experience) would not have:
- Been out of the loop of its development. I don't give a damn whether you're the president of a company, or the president of a nation, if you have commissioned a piece of software that is essential to the success of your pet project, you make sure you know what's going on.
- Talked up the product up until the last day as if it's a done deal. Any manager knows the value of managing expectations. Any president should know that as well, because president is just another level of management. Although it is much more removed from day-to-day management (at least it should be), a president is going to make sure his managers are trustworthy and can tell him when he needs to get involved and start managing the important client's expectations.
- Been taken by surprise at its failure. This has a lot to do with the item above, but also is related to having a backup plan. But you can't really have a backup plan if you don't know what you can and cannot get done - it takes a little bit of time to come up with a plan. Before the enroll date came to pass and before the software had to be live, he should have already had a backup plan. This could have consisted of an alternate offering to the public, a more gradual phasing in of things that worked while they continued to work on other items and acceptance of an offer from Congress to allow the important clients (We, the People) a bit of a break before knocking off millions of policies and causing anguish.
I don't think Obama is stupid. I didn't think George Bush was stupid either. I do think they are both egomaniacal. I don't think either was good for the US. But I do think Bush was an able administrator, whether you agreed with his policies or not. I think he was also much better at reaching a consensus than Obama, though he did have some luck with grabbing more power for the government due to 9/11 than Obama has had with the health care debacle.
Obama has no excuse for the roll-out of the website, for the high prices that seem to be starting and for the millions who lost their health coverage as a result of the law he pushed as his own. He's certainly an idea man, he's certainly charismatic, and he's certainly a leader to that extent. But those things don't make a person a good leader, and Obama is far from that.
I think the argument whether Obama is socialist, communist, fascist or capitalist is moot to a certain extent. He's a horrible administrator/manager, he's egomaniacal, he can't execute ideas that he has without being very wishy-washy and not sticking to what he says and he doesn't really except any fault for failures on his watch. He's a terrible president. I've never attacked him on anything other than that. The horrible thing is when McCain and Palin ran against Obama, I remembered thinking "maybe I'll vote for Obama. I'm tired of this freaking neo-con chicken-hawk crap and anyone dumb enough to OK Sarah Palin as vice president and therefore suitable as presidential material will never get my vote." What a mistake. I think McCain would have done better than Obama if only because he would have been ineffectual and he did live long enough that Palin wouldn't have become president (he'd never have gotten elected to another term).
But Obama does indeed act like a king.
King Obama Lackplan of America. A good reason to live in Argentina. (oh, come on, I'm only half serious!)